


Candid

by Hllangel



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-27
Updated: 2013-08-02
Packaged: 2017-12-21 13:08:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 5,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/900668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hllangel/pseuds/Hllangel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles has a way with animals, people and cameras. Somehow this turns into a very successful career.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Deer

**Author's Note:**

> Posted to my tumblr under the [Photographer!Stiles](http://untitledbychoice.tumblr.com/tagged/Photographer%21stiles) tag. All parts go there first, but will be kept updated here as well. Eventually Stiles/Danny, but at least right now the focus is mostly just on Stiles.

Saying that he’s hiking with friends is somewhat of a misnomer for Stiles. Two full years of keeping up with werewolves combined with his normal ridiculous levels of energy mean that Stiles is charging ahead full bore while his friends dawdle loosely behind, stopping to look at the view or plants or trees, and take pictures. 

Stiles carries his phone on him when they go out, but the whole  _pictures being used to kill people_ has soured him on the subject of photography entirely. 

Except, he turns the corner and there, huddling near a bush is a mother deer and a tiny fawn that can’t be more than a week old. It’s spotty in the way that all baby deer are, spots not faded in the slightest, unsteady on it’s legs, and looking around curiously. He slows, gets as close as he dares (which is several feet closer than he thought he could get, honestly) and slowly drags his phone out of his pocket, switching it to silent so that it doesn’t unintentionally made noise while he’s flipping through to find the camera app. 

He snaps one, then another, and another. All from the same spot, but after the first one, the two decide he’s not a threat to them and stop paying much attention.  

The fourth picture is a blur of movement. He presses the shutter just as he hears a branch crack, accompanied by the loud, boisterous voices of Rebecca and Jared. The deer scramble and run off deeper into the forest away from the footpaths, and Stiles is hit by a shattering sense of loss, and irritation at his friends. 

"You missed it," he tells them as they round the corner into his clearing. He pulls up the best picture and hands his phone over to Rebecca. 

"Oh my god!" she exclaims, voice ticking up an octave or so. 

Stiles sighs. There goes his chance to find any more animals in the quiet space between his own hike and that of his friends. They’ve all probably vacated a mile-wide radius after that noise. After a minute or two of Rebecca bemoaning that she missed it, they get going again since there are a few miles before they come back around to the trail head. Stiles pulls out in front of the others within two minutes, but doesn’t see anything else.  

While he’s waiting for them by the car, he sends the picture off to Scott along with a message, “guess I don’t smell like wolf anymore." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter photo source [here](http://marinascarrphotography.com/winningimages.html)


	2. Bears

There are signs everywhere warning them not to leave food out, to be sure to leave all remnants and hints of food garbage in the bear-proof dumpsters placed strategically away from the main campgrounds. So Stiles expects that there are probably bears nearby. He’s heard stories for years from his friends who vacation up at Lake Tahoe. Mostly they revolve around coming back to their house or cabin or car to find that something’s been broken into, and there’s half chewed food wrappers on the ground. 

Or there was that one time that Sarah came back from vacation with her family with a camera full of pictures of a bear just chilling in the kitchen, fridge contents scattered everywhere.  

All the stories still don’t prepare Stiles to run into an actual bear. Alex had insisted on taking Stiles camping in Yosemite over spring break, said that it was his favorite place in the world, and at this time of year likely to be pretty secluded. By which he’d failed to mention that it was going to be freezing. Not that it really mattered, because half the point of finding the most secluded spot in the campground was so that they could snuggle under the covers and be unlikely to be overheard.  

Even if the purpose of the trip was to indulge in Alex’s kink for sex in nature, Stiles wanted to do some actual hiking while they were there. All the guidebooks said that early morning was best, but Alex was reluctant to be dragged out of bed before noon on a good day, even when that bed was a partially-deflated air mattress.  

So Stiles starts his morning hiking some of the shorter trails looping out from their camp site. It gives him a chance to get out into the fresh air and to see what Yosemite has to offer in the tepid dawn light.  

He’s nearly halfway through the three mile loop when he comes out into a field, a small stream wending it’s way through the middle, and finds the bears. Stiles is well aware that for most people, a sight like this would mean turn and run the other way, but having spent way too much time with an actual pack of werewolves has completely dulled that instinct. 

Instead, he creeps closer and pulls out his phone. They bears give him a look, but go back to their morning business within a minute. Stiles may have lost the desire to run away immediately, but that doesn’t mean all of his caution is gone. He snaps three pictures and backs away slowly, picking up speed as he reaches the trail.  When he gets back to the tent, Alex looks at him with sleepy eyes, and Stiles tosses his phone aside before shucking his outer layers and crawling right back into their warm bed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter photo source [here](http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/black-bear/)


	3. Fox

Once is an incident, twice is a coincidence and three times is a pattern. Stiles just isn’t sure what the pattern is, yet. Other than the fact that he seems to be absurdly good at sneaking up on wildlife.  

He’s on his way back to his cramped dorm from Alex’s apartment on sunday morning when he, once again, stumbles onto scenes that he should not be able to see. 

The streets are pretty much deserted, and the only reason Stiles is up this early, especially after how late they were up last night, is because he has a massive amount of reading to do before he can present his paper idea to his professor. When he says reading, he means finding sources for things he’s known for years, like how all the popular mythology on werewolves is wrong.  

(A major in literature and folklore seems like the easy way out, if he’s honest. He knows a lot of it from Deaton, from the sections of the Argent’s bestiary that Lydia’s translated over the years, from incessant questioning of Peter when he’s mostly sure he won’t get killed for his trouble.)  

Having the basic knowledge of what he’s writing about doesn’t help him dig up actual sources on things, though. For that, Stiles needs time, caffeine, quiet, and he absolutely does not need a handsy boyfriend distracting him.  

About a block from his house, he rounds the corner and there it is, a fox in the middle of the city, strolling down the sidewalks like it has every right to be there, and not caring about the fact that it’s walking on concrete instead of dirt and grass and leaves.  

He clicks a few pictures, but doesn’t really look at them until later in the week, paper topic nailed down (comparison of werewolf myths by region and time - he has an excuse to watch terrible werewolf movies now), when he’s back on Alex’s couch and pulls them up to show him.  

"You should enroll in a photography class," he tells Stiles. “Registration’s next week."  

"I hate cameras," Stiles says. 

Alex is perfectly aware that Stiles doesn’t like to talk about things that happened in high school, and he doesn’t ask about it, even now. Instead, he says, “Get over it. 

You take these gorgeous shots on a whim with a phone camera. Imagine what you could do with actual equipment."  

"Which I can’t afford, thank you very much," Stiles says. He’s got some savings for living expenses and is mostly paying tuition with loans and whatever grants he can scrape together. His Dad is so close to retirement and Stiles really doesn’t want to be a burden on him now, especially when Stiles absolutely knows that his Dad is still paying off hospital bills from his mom, more than ten years later.  

Alex squeezes him closer. These things, he does know about Stiles. “We’ll figure it out."  

When registration opens, the first class Stiles signs up for is photography. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Photo source [here](http://foxes.channel4.com/)


	4. Pigeons

Stiles hates pigeons. Hates, hates,  _hates_  them. But he’s looking for something different to round out his “city" portfolio due next week.  

Turns out that Alex was right, Stiles is good at this thing. Two semesters of getting really good photos using equipment borrowed from school was enough for Stiles to justify getting his first credit card and right away using it to purchase a mid-range dSLR and a few good lenses. (It also helped that he’d taken the baseline classes, learned to use a dark room to develop his own prints, and decided that film was too time consuming and too expensive for the way he liked to shoot.)  

Now that he’s finished his general requirements, he’s decided to stick to his literature major because he does enjoy the folklore niche he’s found, and add in a second major for photography.  

He doesn’t know what sleep is anymore. But it’s worth it for days like today, when he takes his computer and camera on BART into San Francisco, walking until he sees something good and taking fifty pictures of it. He stops every so often to pull the pictures and by late afternoon he’s got a good twenty that he’ll whittle down to five. He’s got famous and not so famous buildings, people in the park, people on the streets, the murals in the mission, a few shots out over the water with the Golden Gate being sucked into the fog that’s rolling in. They’re standard shots of the city, he knows, but he’s finding new things to look at when he focuses through his lens.  

At the end of the day, he strolls through the ferry building, stops for a cone of meat at Boccalone, and goes outside to watch the water. It takes a minute for him to realize that he’s also being watched. Not by humans, but by the pigeons that are ubiquitous around the city. They flock around the ferry buildings in large quantities searching for scraps left behind by tourists, but since he’s fairly alone out here at the moment, he’s target number one.  

"Hey!" he says, flapping a hand at the line that’s inching closer on the railing. 

They don’t budge.  

He carefully wraps up the rest of his meat and shoves it into his pocket, pulling out his camera instead.  

In the end, he chooses to arrange pictures to zoom in on parts of the city: from the bridge and skyscrapers to people, to the rats with wings that accosted him for his food. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Photo source [here](http://jspestcontrol.com/5-tips-for-getting-rid-of-las-vegas-pigeons/)
> 
> The "cone of meat" is a real thing you can get from Boccalone in the San Francisco Ferry building - basically a sampler of whatever salted tasty pig parts they decide to put in it that day. It's delicious.


	5. Hawks

Stiles is falling asleep over his dinner after a really long week (Paper, portfolio review, broken down car, broken down relationship) when Scott calls. They haven’t seen each other in ages, even though they’re both in the bay area because Stiles has been working summers, and Scott’s been working hard to get into Vet school. Sure they share rides back home for holidays, but it’s been a while.

So when Scott calls instead of texting, Stiles knows it’s important and answers. 

"What’s up?" 

"She said yes!" Scott practically shouts. Stiles almost drops his phone, which would be bad because dinner tonight is a bowl of cereal and Stiles knows from vast experience that liquids and phones don’t exactly mix. 

"Like that was ever in doubt," Stiles says, pushing the bowl out of phone-dropping range. 

"Dude be happy for me," Scott says. 

Stiles is trying, but he doesn’t really have much energy for it right now. “I am, Scott. I am. It’s been a long week." 

Since he’s not eating, he grabs the nearest thing to fiddle with, which happens to be his camera. He runs his thumb down the giant scrape on the screen and winces at it, trying not to remember the trip where it had happened, where he’d been so angry at Alex for making him drop the thing, so thankful that it hadn’t actually broken, and then they’d had fantastic makeup sex as soon as the door had closed behind them on the way back. 

He tunes back into Scott’s excitement in time to hear, “We want you to do the engagement photos." 

"Yeah, sure," he says. He wishes immediately that he could take it back. Or at least find a date first. It’s not that he doesn’t want to do this, Scott’s his best friend, and he wants to help give him the best wedding possible. it’s just that it’s a crap week to be talking about weddings. 

"Me and Allison are free this weekend. We can come down," Scott says. 

"Um," Stiles says. He’s not used to having free weekends. He has schoolwork, needs to spend some time in the darkroom, and needs to get his car taken care of, but he won’t be spending Friday and Saturday nights with Alex, out for dinner or in for video games and sex and pretending to get work done while cuddling on the couch. 

"Yeah," he says finally. “Come down Saturday." 

**

He wakes up to incessantly loud knocking on his door. 

"I know you’re in there!" Scott says. 

Stiles groans. Yeah, he definitely drank too much. But at least he’s in his own bed, alone. It could have been so much worse. 

He’s squinting when he opens the door. 

"Dude you smell," Scott says. 

Stiles just blinks at him. 

"Go shower. We’ll go get breakfast. See you in twenty minutes." 

By the time they get back, there’s a pot of coffee that Stiles is seriously considering just drinking straight out of the caraffe, (he thinks it’ll be rude - what if Scott and Allison want some?) and Stiles is clean and dressed and going through his SD cards to figure out which has the most room. 

Scott plonks down a bag of breakfast burritos from the hole in the wall he and Stiles had discovered freshman year, and Stiles reaches for one and starts stuffing it in his face as fast as he can. It’s still the best hangover cure he’s found. 

"So," he says when he’s got enough caffeine and food in his system to be able to think, “there are a few spots that are great for pictures. Half Moon Bay is nice. Good hiking trails, beaches and trees. We can experiment to see how to get Scott’s face on camera."

Scott and Allison share a look. “Perfect," Allison says. 

"You’re driving," Stiles says. “My car’s in the shop."

** 

Allison has three dresses and Scott has a few shirts, which Allison seems to have picked out to match. There’s a lot of laughter and a lot of goofing around between shots, but mostly it’s Stiles following them around the trails and snapping pictures when they’re not posing for them. He hates posed photos. It’s why he likes shooting animals or cityscapes more than doing actual photoshoots, but he can’t say no to Scott. 

During one of the breaks where Allison is changing, and they’re probably fooling around where Stiles can’t see them, but _can still hear them thanks guys_ , he looks up and spots a pair of hawks flying towards them. 

He quickly flips through his settings for the different light and snaps a few frames just before Scott and Allison come out, looking distinctly ruffled (he was right). 

They spend the evening drinking and going through the photos before picking out the ones that they’ll use on their announcements. Stiles copies the rest onto a drive for them to keep, and by the time they leave he’s feeling distinctly better about the world. 

Even if it’s lonely falling asleep by himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Photo credit [here](http://www.komar.org/faq/colorado-red-tailed-hawk/)


	6. Lizards

Like any self-respecting photographer looking for work, Stiles starts a blog. He buys a new car when the Jeep can’t be fixed and starts venturing out into the valley, into the city, anywhere he can reach on a day trip (or overnight if he knows someone in the area).

Most of his photos are absolute crap, but that’s the beauty of digital, he gets to pick and choose what he wants to show. And he never puts anything online without working on the coloring. He likes highly saturated pictures, what can he say? 

"Zoos are awful," Stiles says, when he’s wandering around one with Rebecca. 

"Tell me you’re not going full PETA on me," she says. “I mean, I’m all for animal rights, but they’re nuts." 

Stiles laughs. “I’m talking about pictures," he says. “There’s always glass or bars or mesh in the way of getting the good shot." He taps on the glass in front of them to illustrate his point. 

Which is exactly when a green lizard pokes it’s head out of somewhere. Stiles zooms in on it, attempting to focus past the glass and making sure his flash is off. He has to angle himself strangely to not get any of the natural reflection in the way, but when he snaps off a few shots he ends up liking the result, on the small screen, at least. 

They wander around some more, Stiles takes a lot of pictures in the aviary because there’s nothing between them and the birds, and they get sushi for dinner before going home. 

Stiles cleans up the best of the lizard pictures and posts it with the caption, “knew a guy in high school who looked kinda like this."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Photo source [here](http://brianeyes21comcast.net/2011/page/11/)


	7. Weddings

Scott and Allison set their wedding date for a new moon in August after graduation. Stiles has moved into the City by then and set up a photography business, taking as many jobs as he can. It’s mostly weddings and awful posed family photos, but he does his best. His clients quickly notice that his posed pictures are terrible, but that he’s got a knack for getting everyone to relax and open up, and any candids he takes come out beautifully. 

Soon enough he’s working every weekend at weddings or bar and bat mitzvahs, and even a debutante ball or two. He raises his prices and no one complains. If anything, he gets busier.

But as soon as he gets the date for Scott’s wedding, there’s a big black X over that week on his calendar. He has the privilege of being both best man AND photographer, which means he has to be there all week for the bachelor party (thankfully organized by Isaac), the rehearsal, and he wants at least a day to poke around the event sites to figure out how to get the most out of his camera. 

Isaac and Derek are the two other groomsmen, and the first time Stiles is in the same room with all of them he can’t help but comparing them to the teenagers he knew. He hasn’t actually seen Derek since he moved out of Beacon Hills, though he occasionally sees Isaac when he’s visiting his dad. Everyone looks a lot more relaxed, which probably has to do with the lack of things constantly trying to kill them all. 

Danny shows up for the bachelor party, and Stiles catches a glimpse of Lydia before she and Allison sweep out for their thing. She’s just as beautiful as he remembers. 

"She’s still single," Scott tells him. 

Stiles shrugs. A part of him will always love Lydia, but there’s no way they’d make a good couple. They’re both way too high maintenance to pair off. 

"I should introduce you to Jen at the rehearsal tomorrow," Scott continues. “Allison’s friend from college. The blond one of facebook." 

Stiles knows exactly who he’s talking about, and she is pretty. But Stiles had facebook-stalked her ages ago and decided that it was a bad idea to start anything. Besides, he’s got a casual thing going with one of his neighbors, and he’s working the wedding, which means he’s not going to be looking out for his own interests anyway. He won’t have time if he wants to give his best friend a hell of a wedding album. 

Scott wanders off after that, and Stiles gets a drink before he switches on his camera and starts taking candids of the party. He gets a few wolf eye effects in there, but that just means he’ll have to get them at different angles. He’s learned how to photograph Scott well enough that they’ll be able to have wedding pictures at all. 

(It’s one of the reasons Stiles had offered to be the photographer as well- he doesn’t trust anyone else to be able to do it.) 

Two hours in and the non-wolves are too drunk to be any good in pictures, and Stiles decides that he’s done enough work for the night. The only semi-sober human left is Danny, who Stiles didn’t even know was close enough to the rest to merit an invite. He’s fairly sure it’s through Lydia. 

But whatever. Stiles isn’t particularly close to anyone he actually knows except for Scott, and Scott is busy being swarmed by his college friends that are still in awe of his drinking skills without knowing _why_. Stiles can bug him later. 

He orders a long island and sits down next to Danny. 

"So," he starts. 

"So," Danny agrees. “Still hung up on your attractiveness to gay men?"

Stiles laughs. “Nah, solved that one with my first boyfriend." They laugh, but Stiles has no idea what to say to him other than that. They were never close, and one rehash of Stiles' painfully awkward teen years is enough for him, so instead they sit there and watch the rest of the drunk idiots. By the end of the night Stiles is tipsy but not drunk, and Danny seems perfectly sober. Derek and Isaac split driving everyone back to the hotel, but Danny drops Stiles off at home.

The next morning, he gets a ride back to the bar from his Dad, picks up breakfast burritos for the rest and spends most of the rest of the day running wedding errands.

**

The day of the wedding is foggy and overcast, but Stiles figures that it’ll burn off by midday, and he’s right. The light is perfect by the time they get to the ceremony and the pictures after. Stiles does a few posed ones, as he normally does during weddings, but as usual the ones he snaps while everyone is trying to get themselves in order is the best. 

His personal favorite is one of the two of them in a quiet moment while everyone moves around them, getting lost in each other’s eyes and smiling widely. 

When he gets back to the city late on Sunday evening he knocks on Adam’s door, knowing that he’ll still be up, and pushes him back inside as soon as he answers it. In between kisses he thinks of all the things he could have said to Danny.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A wild Danny appears! 
> 
> Photo source [here](http://en.paperblog.com/outdoor-wedding-inspiration-and-photoshoot-14829/)


	8. Chapter 8

The wedding and family portrait business may pay the bills, but Stiles is looking for something that doesn’t involve posed photos at all. They’re the bane of his existence, he swears. And ever single one of his clients praises his eye for candids anyway. When he sees an ad calling for freelance photographers for the weekly free paper in the Castro he jumps on it.

They’re apparently looking for a few freelance photographers willing to cover the upcoming Pride parade. It’s a weekend Stiles tends to refuse jobs usually, because he likes the celebrations. Stiles compiles all of his information and submits a few pictures, from Scott’s wedding, from last year’s Pride, and candids from the city. 

A week before the event he gets the email he’s been waiting for: they want twenty pictures to publish online and in their print version on Wednesday, after. The pay sucks, and he has to sign over the rights to the pictures he submits to them, but it’s a job that involves absolutely no posing. 

The images the paper is looking for are from the parade, but Stiles knows that there will be events all weekend, and so he ventures out into the Castro on Friday night to find people plastered in as much rainbow gear as possible. It always makes him smile. He’s not in anything bright himself, as he wants to blend into the background as much as possible. The game’s up as soon as someone sees him with his camera. He’s also counting on there being tons of people with cameras out over the next few days as well. 

The next few days go something like: coffee, pictures, repeat, review pictures, sleep. By the time he gets to sunday evening he’s exhausted, tired and sore, but from the quick reviews he’s been going through he think he has what he needs to submit to the paper in the morning. 

He’s going through his last batch from the parade, looking at the joyous crowd gathered around the long flag when he thinks he sees a familiar face. He’s out of the focus of the camera, so it’s hard to tell, but Stiles is fairly sure that it’s Danny. He had no idea that Danny was anywhere near San Francisco. Of course, it’s entirely possible that it’s not Danny at all. He’s pretty sure he read somewhere that there’s a finite number of faces in the world, and everyone’s a variation of a basic shape. 

Of course that could have been one of the cheap scifi or horror novels he devours in his spare time. 

Either way, it’s probably not actually Danny. But even though that picture is stunning, Stiles keeps it to himself and finds one that doesn’t have anyone he knows in it. Or even the hint of anyone he knows. He spends an hour fixing the colors and sends off multiple emails with the high-res versions of the photos. 

They’re up on the website the next day, and he picks up several print versions to send home on wednesday. He never mentions Danny to anyone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Photo source [](http://flavorwire.com/399844/flavorpill-guide-to-the-weeks-top-10-sf-events-10)


	9. Flight

National Geographic is a dream. A far away dream that would let him travel with nothing but a backpack and a camera. Instead, Stiles has pulled some work for an airline magazine, taking pictures of touristy places in blue sky style. It lets him travel, and pays fairly well, including all inclusive stays at resorts in places like Singapore, but the pictures they want are boring. 

But they give him at least a week on each location, one trip every few months, and he uses his downtime to actually explore the cities they send him to. When he’s not taking pictures of five-star meals given to him by the resorts, he’s eating street foods with sticky fingers and browsing open spice markets and talking to everyone he can. These are the views of the cities he likes best. 

It’s purely coincidence that he stumbles on a family saying that they’ve been robbed by gnomes. Jokes about gnomes stealing left socks aside, there are enough concrete details in what they’re telling the assembled crowd that Stiles thinks there might be something to the story. But he doesn’t have enough time to wait out the crowds and make it back to his appointment with the hotel and airline management, so he makes a note of where he is and heads out. He starts researching gnomes as soon as he’s finished with work. 

Turns out that gnomes are halfway between dragons and weasels. They live underground, collect shiny things and _hate_ humans. Which is where the sock thing comes in, Stiles finds. If there’s nothing small and shiny that they can easily get to, they take socks just to piss off the humans. 

And apparently they breed like rabbits, so there’s no real way to get rid of them, you just have to gnome-proof your house. He works for three days, digging trenches, hauling gravel, and planting mint at the borders of the house and along the street. He leaves smears of dirt and dust on every part of his camera in the process and mentally thanks whoever taught him to keep filters on his lenses all the time. Lens cleaning cloths are gifts from the gods, but too many uses and he’s going to dull the glass. He ends up staying a few extra days, out of his own pocket, but it’s worth it when the remote cameras they rig up catch a gnome getting to the border of the house, wrinkling his nose and turning away in disgust. 

Stiles tapes a coin into the framed photo and gives it to his new friends before boarding his flight home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Photo source [here](https://urbanfragment.wordpress.com/tag/airplane/)


	10. Owls

Stiles has been away for six years, and he doesn’t expect to recognize anyone at the Sheriff’s office other than maybe a few deputies who both a) lived through the horror of Stiles’ high school years and b) wanted to stay in law enforcement after. Which means that the first person he sees on his way in to have lunch with his dad is Danny, sitting at a desk intently looking at something on the computer. 

"I thought you’d fled to the safety of Silicon Valley," he says. "Where people still think that cutthroat is a metaphor." 

Danny flashes him a grin. "Nah. My little sister is graduating next week, so I’m back for a few weeks. Doing a favor for your dad while I’m here and de-bugging all the computers." 

It strikes Stiles as a bit weird that his Dad would have asked Danny for a favor, but then, it could just mean that they ran into each other at the store. And Stiles is the one who had once upon a time snuck into sealed files and learned about Danny’s computer abilities. It’s absolutely logical that the Sheriff, with legitimate, first-hand knowledge would have asked for help. 

Instead of saying any of this, though, he opts for a terrible joke. "Any desire to go back there?" Most of the people from their graduating class had fled Beacon Hills immediately, if their families hadn’t pulled them out before. 

Danny’s smile falters, and Stiles suddenly remembers his thing with half the Twinsformers. "Shit, Danny, I’m sorry." 

"It’s not something I like to think about much. And none of my fraternity brothers ever understood why I didn’t agree with them about twins." 

"That’s fair." 

"Stiles?" His dad ventures out of his office with a stack of files, and a puzzled expression on his face. "What are you doing here?" 

Stiles holds up the bag he’s carrying. "Thought I’d join you for lunch." 

He gets a skeptical look in response, but it doesn’t really matter. He’s already here, and he’s made an excellent lunch. 

Before he can think too much about what he’s saying, and before he goes to join Dad in the break room, he turns back to Danny. "We should get coffee before we both go home. Catch up." 

Danny pauses and stares at him. But just when Stiles is about to say _no, nevermind, you’ve probably got things to do with your family, congratulations to your sister, I’ll see you at the reunion in four years_ Danny cracks, smiles and says, "Sure."

* 

Vacation is coming to an end, and Stiles has to be back for three weddings in the next week, but he can’t leave without one last hike through the preserve with Scott. The ground on the lesser-used trails is soft and spongy, and Stiles is continually running into spiderwebs that cross the paths and which he, without perfect wolf eyes, can’t see unless the sun is _just right_. He has his camera with him, but isn’t taking many pictures, because this isn’t work - it’s his last day of vacation, and he’s wandering through the woods with his best friend. 

When they stumble on a tree that’s nearly falling apart, and the owl inside it, he can’t help but stop and take a picture. 

"Owls are good luck, aren’t they?" Scott asks, once they move on and leave the owl to it’s peace. "Didn’t we talk about it in english?" 

"Only if you’re Greek," Stiles says. "Most lore about owls have them connected to death. Or there are the stories about using owl parts as medicine." 

Scott makes a face. "Did you have to ruin it? I’m trying to tell you something." 

"Next time open with ‘Stiles, can I tell you something?’ It’s much clearer that it’s an introduction to further discussion instead of a question about mythology."

"Anyway. Allison’s pregnant." 

Stiles stops moving. He suddenly has about a thousand questions about werewolves and children that Scott probably knows nothing about, but that’s never stopped Stiles from asking things before. He’ll get to that later. For now, just grins, pulls Scott into a hug and then punches him in the shoulder and takes about ten shots in quick succession of Scott’s stumble, angry face, and focused glare at Stiles before launching at him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Photo Source [here](http://weezbo.com/amazing-wildlife-photography-by-burrard-lucas-brothers.html)

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by an [adorable baby animal photoset](http://untitledbychoice.tumblr.com/post/56635450472/theanimalblog-snow-leopard-cubs-photo-credit) with a photographer whose last name is "Stiles". And then I couldn't stop thinking about it.


End file.
